NOT FIT TO PRINT

Did anybody read today's front-page New York Times story about Tom Coburn, the GOP's wingnut candidate for Senate in Oklahoma, and wonder about this unexplained passage?

While criticizing state legislators in Oklahoma City, he used what he called "an inappropriate word" that even he conceded had gotten him in trouble.

Golly -- this is a guy who loves Jesus and calls for the death penalty for abortion providers. What on earth could he have said about those legislators that was so awful the Times wouldn't print it?

Here's your answer:

State Democratic Party Chairman Jay Parmley on Thursday called for Republican U.S. Senate candidate Tom Coburn to apologize for comments made during an Altus Town Hall meeting.

Parmley said Coburn told supporters Aug. 21 that "you have a bunch of crapheads in Oklahoma City that have killed the vision of anybody wanting to invest in Oklahoma."...

Stumping in Stillwater on Thursday, Coburn told The Oklahoman that he wouldn't respond to Parmley's calls for an apology.

"Did I use an inappropriate word? Maybe ... "

"Craphead." He said "craphead."

That's too racy for the Times.

Also today, a review appeared in the Times book section of a memoir by Nick Flynn that focuses on Flynn's work at a homeless shelter and the time Flynn's father spent living at the same shelter; the book is entitled, as the Times puts it, Another Bull____ Night .... So what's that really supposed to be? Cover your eyes if you've got a delicate sensibility: The real title of the book is Another Bullshit Night in Suck City. OK -- I can see not wanting to print "Bullshit" in a "family newspaper," but "Suck City"? Is "suck" any more than a mild, TV-friendly vulgarism these days?

Incidentally, the fastidious nannies of the Times still offer the complete text of the Starr Report on the paper's Web site.

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Speaking of books, I'm glad to see the Daily Howler saying this about Unfit to Command, the Swift boat book by John O'Neill and Jerome Corsi:

This summer, the overwrought pair published a book which may have transformed this White House campaign. But very few newspapers have dared to review it, and one thing readers are not being told is how kooky this important book is.

The New York Times is one of the papers that haven't reviewed the book -- in fact, since 1996, the Times has reviewed only 17 Regnery books, and that total includes A Prima Donna's Progress: The Autobiography of Joan Sutherland and Ross Leckie's historical novel Hannibal. When lefty Nicholson Baker wrote Checkpoint, a novella about a yammerer who wants to kill Bush, the Times leapt on as soon as it was published -- and gave it a vicious pan. But Regnery's right-wing attack books go unreviewed in the Times year in and year out -- High Crimes and Misdemeanors, by Ann Coulter, Hell to Pay by Barbara Olson, Unlimited Access by Gary Aldrich, Betrayal by Bill Gertz, Dereliction of Duty by Robert "Buzz" Patterson, and Shakedown: Exposing the Real Jesse Jackson by Kenneth R. Timmerman, to name a few. Most of those were big Times bestsellers. They help set the terms of America's political debate -- yet no one at the Times bothers to engage them. Unfit to Command is just the latest in a long series of Regnery stink bombs that were able to do their damage in part by getting under the elite media's radar.